We Welcome You to OEGlobal 2026! 🌎

[marcela]

Dear OEGlobal community,

Welcome! We are so happy to have you here as we get ready to come together for OEGlobal 2026.

Whether you’ll be joining us in Cambridge or participating online from somewhere around the world, you are an important part of this gathering. This conference has always been about much more than a program of sessions. It is about the people who come together to share ideas, ask questions, make connections, challenge one another, and imagine what openness can make possible.

This year’s invitation is Come Invent With Us! Innovating open practices to uphold and uplift knowledge as a public good. And we mean it. This is a conference we create together. We hope you’ll bring your experiences, your questions, your curiosity, and your ideas, and make this space your own.

Throughout the conference, we’ll explore what comes next for openness: how we strengthen our shared global vision, create deeper human connections, respond to emerging technologies, rethink the systems and practices that shape our work, and continue expanding access to knowledge as a public good. These ideas will take many forms across the program, but they are all connected by a belief in what we can learn, imagine, and create together.

And this Lobby is a place to begin. Introduce yourself, tell us where you’re joining from, reconnect with people you know, meet someone new, and start a conversation. We hope the exchanges that begin here will continue throughout the conference and well beyond it.

We are so excited to welcome this global community to OEGlobal 2026, and we look forward to learning, connecting, and inventing together with all of you.

To get us started: Where are you joining from, and what are you most looking forward to exploring at OEGlobal 2026?

See you very soon!

Marcela Morales and Igor Lesko
Co-Executive Directors
Open Education Global

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OEGlobal 2026 Navigator

Program in Sched
OEGlobal 2026 Conference Web Site

Main Space in OEGConnect
Front Entrance public conversations “outside” the venue

For Attendees:
The Lobby meet attendees
Information Desk updates and help
Session Conversations discussion and sharing
Interaction Zone activities and things to do

[cogdog]

Hello, I am Alan Levine, Director of Community Engagement for OEGlobal and Chief Noisemaker here in OEG Connect. I will be an online participate in the conference this year from my home base outside of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

As I have a good chunk of responsibility of shaping the hybrid conference experience, it feels appropriate to operate from the online side and be a connector with everybody on site in Cambridge, our online participants, and our participants at the Satellite event in Vancouver,.

I am sad to not be in Cambridge to be there with so many colleagues but also that I have been fortunate to visit MIT a few times, the first way back in 2005 when I worked at the Maricopa Community Colleges as part of the Crosstalk Series (thanks MIT for keeping old web pages alive), and have enjoyed walking the campus, peeking in classrooms, labs, and taking photos of the amazing architecture.

The Daring of Stata flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

Ask me about the time I inadvertently wandered into a private event at the Media Lab and got kicked out

I am most excited to meet and greet and get to know everyone who makes their way into this space. And I am counting on everybody and sharing a lot of ideas and disccussions here plus a good bit of photo sharing.

[mark.wilson]

Hola desde El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula, California. Or, LA.

I’m looking forward to OEGlobal and will again be attending online. I facilitate open education with Karlstad University’s Open Networked Learning, StoryCenter.org & StoryHost.net. I hope to join other open enthusiasts and learn a thing or two.
Bryan Mathers drew this for my presentation at Reclaim Open 2025 Rewilding the Network – Making New Connections.

Mark

[shiras]

We’ll miss having you in Cambridge, Massachusetts this October, Alan, but we couldn’t ask for a better hybrid- and virtual-ambassador for all conference attendees of OEGlobal 2026! Thank you for shepherding the community for all forms of engagement during the conference-- our goal is to make it a meaningful and connected experience regardless of one’s modality.

So, let me say “Hello!” and “Welcome!” to all logging in to this special conference Connect space, and from the campus of MIT we look forward to welcoming you however you are able to join!

And for those I haven’t yet met: I’m one of your (many) co-chairs of the conference -Shira

[cogdog]

And I will miss seeing you and being on that mythical campus! But I will make noise.

Thanks for the fantastic conference organizing you and @sehansen which appears like that special kind of herding. Are you keeping count of how many conference emails are flowing out of your box?

Now let’s see of we can get Bob in here, I so enjoy his positive attitude.

[heatherb]

Hello Open Education Friends,

I’m Heather Blicher, Director of the Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER), the North American division of OEGlobal. I’m excited to be heading back up North for the conference (I lived and worked in New Hampshire for a couple of years with many day trips to Boston and Cambridge throughout). I’m also very happy to welcome and greet in-person and virtual attendees to the conference. It is a challenging time for all, but I have heard from many people in the U.S. that this conference is a much welcomed opportunity to get together and support each other. We welcome you!

Warmly,

Heather

[sehansen]

Hi, everyone. My name is Sarah Hansen. I’m the Assistant Director for Open Education Innovation at MIT Open Learning and I’m one of the co-chairs of the conference. I lived in Cambridge for many years, and now I live and work remotely in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I love coming back to Cambridge, and I can’t wait to welcome you to MIT and the surrounding neighborhood. There is an ENERGY here that is unique. You’ll feel like you can invent anything – because you can! Here are a few of my favorite photos from in and around MIT. I hope you feel excited!

[actualham]

Hi everyone! I am Robin DeRosa, Executive Director of the Open Education Network, which is based at the University of Minnesota in the U.S. I live in New Hampshire, a couple hours north of Boston, so I will be heading down to be f2f at this year’s conference. The OEN is also hosting a couple of field-trippy events and a relaxed poetry share (in addition to our regular OEN meet-up which will be a morning café social)-- lots of fun! I will be on a couple of panel sessions as well, talking about tech/AI in one and about the commons/ecosystems/institutions (OH MY!) in the other, with some super smart and generous colleagues. So yeah-- excited to see you all, whether it be online or in Boston.

Sending love out to my friends outside of the US who are avoiding travel to this country right now due to unsafe and/or politically horrifying conditions here.

[cogdog]

Waving hello @actualham I could not be more excited you will be a presence at the conference and celebrating all of the activities OEN is organizing.

I will sadly not be there to greet you but very much will “there” from “here”. I hope you can maybe share/promote your presentations as new topic threads in the Session Conversations area and as well any bits you can share back from the “field-trippy events” et al perhaps in the Interaction Zone.

And I can hope that your travel from New Hampshire down to Cambridge is without any weird hassles. Sending virtual hugs all the way!